The jeweller’s incipient intoxication had vanished like smoke before the wind.  He looked at his son with fixed, uneasy eyes, trying to discover whether he was making game of him.

But Beausire exclaimed: 

“Oh, these confounded doctors!  They all sing the same tune—­eat nothing, drink nothing, never make love or enjoy yourself; it all plays the devil with your precious health.  Well, all I can say is, I have done all these things, sir, in every quarter of the globe, wherever and as often as I have had the chance, and I am none the worse.”

Pierre answered with some asperity: 

“In the first place, captain, you are a stronger man than my father; and in the next, all free livers talk as you do till the day when—­when they come back no more to say to the cautious doctor:  ‘You were right.’  When I see my father doing what is worst and most dangerous for him, it is but natural that I should warn him.  I should be a bad son if I did otherwise.”

Mme. Roland, much distressed, now put in her word:  “Come, Pierre, what ails you?  For once it cannot hurt him.  Think of what an occasion it is for him, for all of us.  You will spoil his pleasure and make us all unhappy.  It is too bad of you to do such a thing.”

He muttered, as he shrugged his shoulders.

“He can do as he pleases.  I have warned him.”

But father Roland did not drink.  He sat looking at his glass full of the clear and luminous liquor while its light soul, its intoxicating soul, flew off in tiny bubbles mounting from its depths in hurried succession to die on the surface.  He looked at it with the suspicious eye of a fox smelling at a dead hen and suspecting a trap.  He asked doubtfully:  “Do you think it will really do me much harm?” Pierre had a pang of remorse and blamed himself for letting his ill-humour punish the rest.

“No,” said he.  “Just for once you may drink it; but do not take too much, or get into the habit of it.”

Then old Roland raised his glass, but still he could not make up his mind to put it to his lips.  He contemplated it regretfully, with longing and with fear; then he smelt it, tasted it, drank it in sips, swallowing them slowly, his heart full of terrors, of weakness and greediness; and then, when he had drained the last drop, of regret.

Pierre’s eye suddenly met that of Mme. Rosemilly; it rested on him clear and blue, far-seeing and hard.  And he read, he knew, the precise thought which lurked in that look, the indignant thought of this simple and right-minded little woman; for the look said:  “You are jealous—­that is what you are.  Shameful!”

He bent his head and went on with his dinner.

He was not hungry and found nothing nice.  A longing to be off harassed him, a craving to be away from these people, to hear no more of their talking, jests, and laughter.